


The Lucky Ones

by thatsrightdollface



Category: Sally Face (Video Games)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Friendship, Gen, Hope, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Multiple Timelines, headcanons
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-04
Updated: 2019-04-16
Packaged: 2020-01-04 18:44:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 5
Words: 7,002
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18349517
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thatsrightdollface/pseuds/thatsrightdollface
Summary: Sal had thought it was nearly too good to be true, how the X-Files-y people swept in and took care of the murderous cult around Addison Apartments.  After seeing the way things could’ve gone…  (Were supposed to go?) …  Well.  He was probably right.





	1. Bad Idea

**Author's Note:**

> Hi there! Thank you so much for giving this story a try. :D I really hope you enjoy it!!! I’m sorry for anything I might’ve misinterpreted/gotten wrong. 
> 
> Happy April~

Sal Fisher had gotten the grocery store cart with the rattling wheel, again.  Really, he knew he should spin around and put it back; he could replace it with another cart, easy, and then just wander around without a clattering, squealing soundtrack.  Just that little bit more unseen and inconspicuous.  Sal felt watched too much of the time, after all, considering strangers’ reactions to his prosthetic face...  And, y’know, everything that had happened with that cult in high school.  Considering the jelly-slick eyes in the walls of his old apartment building, blinking away flecks of sour old paint; considering their school’s bologna sandwiches and the fact that Sal could never unlearn the taste of human meat.

Big fancy supernatural phenomena-investigating organizations were still trying to hunt down the last few shreds of the cult that had taken root in Sal’s town, nowadays.  They’d come in with their metaphorical guns blazing and very serious-looking badges that made all the cops in town slink away.   Even those cops planted there by the actual cult — it was something about ancient orders of monster-research, something about a human’s right to live without getting possessed by gloppy demon/alien-whatevers like some sort of meat puppet.  Whatever it was, it had worked.  The organization had listened to Sal and his friends when they showed them what was really in Nockfell’s lunch meat; when they peeled up those rotten floorboards to reveal what was squirming underneath.  Cultists in dog masks; Devourers of God.

Sal kept waiting for the catch to reveal itself, for something to go terribly, irredeemably wrong.  For blood soaking into cheap carpet; for dread to uncoil inside him like it had never really left.  But it didn’t.  He and his friends had been interviewed for TV and called unlikely, almost impossible heroes.  Sal was given plenty of business cards by various X-Files types, and told maybe after college, hey, you never know, there might be an opening in their organization somewhere.

He’d been given warnings, too, though, and sometimes those came out a bit less friendly.  It was the bright-eyed ones, the ones who let themselves care too much, who threw themselves into danger until it drowned them.  It was the ones like Sal, people said.  But he hadn’t drowned, not this time.  It kept feeling like he was supposed to _do something different_ , but the town cleaned itself up around him all the same.

Sal had a guitar that could summon the dead with eerie music; Sal and his friend Todd had a shed full of investigation stuff, and they were gonna be getting a swanky new space heater for it soon enough.  He felt silly after a while, bracing himself for everything to fall apart.  Not that anybody in his life made him feel especially silly, mind you.  He was sure it was all in his own head.

Sal didn’t go back and exchange the shopping cart, this time.  Maybe he felt a little bad for it, always getting handed away or groaned at; maybe people were gonna stare anyway, so oh well, right?  Ash might’ve said it was because he was sweet.  She always thought Sal was kinder than he was, he thought.

Sal was picking up a few things for the house, just now – Larry was out of shampoo, and they needed to restock on basics like milk and more of those coffee beans Sal would probably have to politely avoid having anything to do with.  He had a list in his back pocket; he had his hair in pigtails again that day, tied with ribbons that were also an ad for Ashley’s latest makeshift art show.

Sal was trying to coax the rattling, ruined wheel of that cart around a corner and down the cereal aisle when he saw it.  The cereal aisle wasn’t the cereal aisle anymore.  All around him were the crackling yellow fluorescents of the grocery store, sure, and the greasy tile and the crusty freezers and the two-for-one frosted s’mores Pop-Tart sales.  Sure, sure.  But up ahead, there was something darker.  Something that wasn’t supposed to be there...  Same as a gloppy, dripping slime monster wasn’t supposed to have snatched up the owner of Addison Apartments and borrowed his voice; same as ominous cults weren’t really supposed to be around facilitating bologna-related murders at all.

It looked like a watery, hazy version of the same store, with Ash sitting slumped against one of the shelves of cereal.  She seemed older, and tired.  Her eyes were red and swollen like she’d been crying – except that Ashley never cried, did she? – and she had Sal’s old Super Gear Boy balanced on her lap.  There was an expression on her face Sal had never seen before. She looked utterly lost, maybe. Like it wouldn’t even be worth it to heave herself up onto her scuffed boots and try to figure out her way again.

This wasn’t _Sal’s_ Ashley Campbell. He knew that, absolutely. The Ash he knew would probably ride her motorcycle over that weekend and play games or something.  They’d heat up a pizza when Larry got off work; they’d make old jokes and finalize their Halloween costume plans.  Sal’s Ash has never been so lost in a grocery store...  Never been so lost at all, anywhere.

Sal choked, seeing this Ashley.  He felt small and cold and gripped that rattling cart so tightly his hands ached.  He thought about all those business cards he had in a drawer back in his and Todd’s shed. All those contacts who might know how to handle a situation like this the “right” way – to shut off connection to a reality that wasn’t supposed to be open, or... Or make sure there wasn’t something wicked growing in the supermarket, or...

Sal tried not to feel a little vindicated, knowing there were still holes in his world. Still reasons to be questioning, to feel incomplete.

Sal pushed that cart with the rattling wheel forward and over to the Ashley that wasn’t his Ashley, down the cereal aisle that wasn’t quite real.  The light changed just enough to make his guts sink as the world went wrong all around him.

This was a bad idea. This was a bad idea –

“Hey Ash,” Sal said.  He would leave quickly. He would be a friend, just the way this Ashley’s Sal Fisher might hopefully be, and then he would go back to shopping.  “You okay?”

Ashley smothered a scream with her hands.  If Sal had thought it wasn’t possible for her to look any more lost just a second ago – and he _had_ thought that, he really had, that’s what’d gotten him so worried – then...  Uh.  Oops.


	2. The Treehouse Wood is Rotting

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi again!!! I hope you enjoy this chapter. :D Thank you for reading!

Ashley Campbell had watched her best friend die that day.  She had seen Sal Fisher strapped into an electric chair without even his prosthetic face to help him feel safe.  Feel like himself.

He hadn’t struggled, and he hadn’t known Ash was there pounding sweaty, shaking fists on the glass of the door, screaming for just a sliver of a chance to bring him back into the world with her.  To prove him innocent with a photo of Larry the Ghost that was now folded up sloppily in the pocket of her coat.  The ink had blurred a little in the rain.  Ashley’d been holding it so tightly.

She had seen the exact second Sal’s last breath caught in his throat like so many never-to-be-spoken words.  Human meat was such a fragile thing.  Unspeakably fragile.  Sal went hollow in seconds, like smothering a sky full of stars with a glance. It was so horrible and strange Ash wouldn’t have wanted to even try putting it into complete thought.

After Sal died — ( _Sally Face was dead_...  Her platonic prom date, her confidant, her painting companion and only just recently her pen-pal in a prison she hadn’t even known the name of before he got shipped away there) — Ash wasn’t sure where to go.  She considered heading back to the treehouse to confront Larry’s ghost.  To tell him what had happened; to admit she’d failed and explain how Sal had died.  The thought of Larry’s washed-out distant eyes hurting _even more_ made Ashley’s insides ache, though.  She was shaking.  Maybe she should go to Maple’s, for just a little while?  To gather her head?

Ashley imagined Maple helping her go through the grey folders of funeral paperwork she’d been given to look over, back at the prison. She imagined Maple ushering her inside, and the air smelling like hot cocoa, and Maple offering her a towel for her rain-soaked hair.  In her mind the towel smelled like soft floral laundry detergent and had little kitten faces on it.  Ashley realized she couldn’t possibly go to Maple’s the second she imagined that towel.  Not now.  Maple’s daughter had used that kitty towel as a superhero cape sometimes, hadn’t she?  The same daughter who Sal had left carved up and cold on the floor of their old apartment.  The way Sal had left _so many_ people broken — had their deaths looked like stars going out to him, too? — back then.

Sal had promised he was trying to save the world, that he knew, _he knew_ it was the only way.  Ash hadn’t been able to believe him until it was too late.

She ended up in the grocery store to get out of the rain, to think.  She found herself slumped in the cereal aisle, trying to talk herself into picking up Sal’s mission where he’d left off – if she even could.  Wondering how she’d go about summoning back Sal’s ghost.  He had walked her through how to find his old spirit-detecting Super Gear Boy via an intricate code on the back of one of his last letters from prison.  It had been so desperate and sad-feeling then, and sort of like he’d tried to make the scavenger hunt a little fun for her.  If anyone Ash knew might do that, wouldn’t it be Sally Face?  Not the bloodstained one.  The one before –

 _They were one and the same_ —

Ash was wondering what she would do if Sal never answered her; Ash was staring at a bent-up box of sugary Halloween cereal she knew Sal had liked back in the day.  And then –

And then he wandered out of thin air, looking so young and blissfully unaware, pushing around a cart with a squeaky wheel. Worrying about her.

Sal Fisher.

At first, actually, Ash thought it was someone in a _super insensitive_ costume, but then...  It was Sal’s exact voice, raspy and quiet, so earnest she almost couldn’t stand it.  She recognized those ribbons in his hair, even.  That art show had been a complete flop, financially, but at least they’d had fun.  Sal had brought everybody beer but drank a lot of Sprite, himself.

If Ashley let herself scream, supermarket employees would start looking for her, probably — if Ashley let herself scream, it was possible at least one employee would join her in the cereal aisle and recognize wanted/just-recently-executed mass murderer Sally Face.  If someone shoved back his prosthetic and saw the scars were the same...  If someone tried to take him away again...

Sal gasped and went “Wait — _Ash_ — C’mon —“ when Ashley stumbled to her feet and wrapped him up in her rain-wet coat.  Her hoodie, too...  She pulled the hood up over his hair, hissing, _“Can anyone else see you?  You’re not supposed to be here!”_ in a voice she knew he’d realize wasn’t truly angry.  Not as spitting furious as she sounded.  Just protective.

Sal didn’t struggle, but he _did_ keep glancing behind him, puzzled, into an empty patch of air.

“Geez.  It’s okay — I’m wearing the coat,” Sal chuckled.  He sounded so nervous, so much more _alive inside_ than all the most recent times Ashley had heard Sally Face’s voice. In media interviews, at his awful trial. It was unreal.  Sal angled his prosthetic face away from the store’s security cameras, an almost playful glint in his non-glass eye.  He was trying to be obedient, but he didn’t understand any of this.  Couldn’t know what was going on.  Couldn’t know why Ash was still holding onto his arm so, so tightly, though he was too kind to pull away.  There was shampoo in his shopping cart.  Shampoo, a new phone charger, eggs.  Milk.  Coffee.  He had his wallet in a ragged backpack slung over one shoulder and now mostly buried under Ashley’s coat.  His ID was the same.  Even his library card number, the same.  He'd fumbled around and shown her, as if she was mostly concerned about him being some sort of doppelganger, instead of... -- 

Ashley considered asking Sal whether he was real — a ghost, a hallucination, some new way the cult was trying to claw a red-eyed void into their souls — but his arm was warm and solid in her hand.  She felt like she might start crying all over again.

“You know you can tell me whatever you need to,” Sal said.  Slowly.  “If we can’t talk here, then where?”

The last time Ashley had ridden with Sally Face on her motorcycle, they were going to scream by the edge of a lake.  It was one of the last times she’d seen him...  The absolute last time she’d seen him whole and awake behind his eyes.  Ash made Sal tuck all his hair up into a helmet, now.  She told him not to let any cars that passed them see his face.  There weren’t too many people driving on those dark, muddy roads anyway, but better safe than sorry.  She realized she was saying that a lot, just then, murmuring it to him like it was some sort of spell.  Some sort of prayer.

“Better safe than sorry,” Ash would say, and Sal would nod.  Offer up, “Right,” like an obliging _“Amen.”_

The air was sour and sticky, out by Addison Apartments and Larry’s sagging treehouse.  Ashley and Sal walked together, then, and she could see how the crumbling, time-stained graffiti on the wall of that old apartment building hurt him.  His home — his dad’s home, Larry’s home, Lisa’s home — left to rot.  Sal didn’t say anything about all that, but he didn’t need to.  He walked around wide-eyed, like he was making his way through a nightmare.

He climbed up after Ashley into what remained of Larry’s treehouse, and sat cross-legged, obliging, on the moldy, water-warped wood.  Sal looked stiffly all around, like he saw ghosts everywhere — like questions about Larry were right on the tip of his tongue but he didn’t want to rush her, yet.

“Maybe this is a mistake,” Ashley began... “If you’re real, and, I don’t know... _Lucky_.  Not from here.”

“Wait.  What is?”

Ashley took a deep breath.  She thought about what Larry and Sal had both said, warning about the end of the world.  She thought of that too-raw, aching moment when Sal had gone empty.  “You don’t have to know what happened here. This isn’t your horror story.  It was a mistake to bring you —”

“I _did_ get lucky, somehow,” Sal cut her off.  It wasn’t exactly like him to interrupt, but he folded his arms around himself, doing it.  It was like he felt responsible for something.  Like he felt guilty.  Ashley’s Sal had always felt like he had to take care of things that weren’t his fault, too.   “This isn’t my Larry’s treehouse, but it could have been.  It’s okay, Ash.  Please.”

Ashley’s fingers twitched together, fumbling, and Sal took one of her hands in his.  Squeezed softly, and then pulled away.  She caught just a glimpse of the scars along his wrists.

“I’ll think of where to start,” Ashley promised.  But in the end, she didn’t have to.

Larry’s ghost manifested without being called, this time — squelching meat and liquid bone rearranging themselves into his grey, half-smiling face.  Into his limp, shadow-greasy hair.  “Thank God, man.  You made it —” he started to say.  But then he noticed Sal’s pigtails, his slim arms, his art show ribbons...  Everything.

Larry frowned.  Said, “What the hell...?”

“I’ll tell you my story when you tell me yours,” Sal said.  His voice was warm.  Firm, muffled just a bit by his prosthetic face.  He sounded scared, looking at Larry — his best friend, his brother, dead younger than he was, now.  Dead, and he couldn’t know how, yet... Unless he’d already guessed, and what it made him think of brought that horrified quaver to his voice.  Maybe his Larry had thought about it, too — maybe he’d wandered close, cupped pills in his hand.  Maybe.

Ashley knew she could’ve apologized for running away on Sal the night his world fell apart, then...  The night he was given his merciless, hungry knife.  She could have promised him she’d never do anything like that again…  That she’d fight for him even if the world tore her down, too.  Whatever exactly it was, inside Todd.  Whatever was trying to consume them all.  But there was _so much_ to the story, so many pieces that tangled together in her head.  Could it ever be enough to apologize to a Sal who’d never felt so abandoned by her?

Instead, Larry offered, “I guess, uh, we’ve got a lot to get through.  I’ll talk fast, seeing as humanity’s ending?”

And Sal said, “ _Ha_.  Oh, God.  Right.”


	3. Dead Side of Things

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy Wednesday~ I hope you enjoy this chapter, if you read it. :D There's a point in canon where Miss Rosenberg tells Sal he won't be able to live as well as he can, "not in this life" or something like that, and I've been thinking about the possibility of Other-Sals ever since. Ahahaha. Sorry again for anything I might've misremembered or gotten weird! 
> 
> Have a great day!!!

_ The darkness would come for everything, in almost no time at all. _

_For a while, Sal had thought maybe he could stop it.  Shove the plague, the hunger, back beyond his town.  His world, his friends, all their too-bright, too fragile souls.  He’d given everything; he’d been wrong.  Sal had walked to his execution without his shoulders even shaking – with heavy, knowing steps.  He’d realized maybe he could see Larry, now.  Again.  Finally.  They’d do what they could from the spirit side of things, but if the red-eyed demon’s plague spread…  If they couldn’t save Todd and everything got swallowed in cosmic ink just like Larry’s dad’s world had been…  Damn.  At least they’d have been together.  It wasn’t what Sal had sold his life for, but it meant something if he and Larry might not have to be alone._

_It felt like so much of Sal had died a long time ago – died the second he took that knife in his hand, died when he knew he could do what needed to be done.  That had been a whole different sort of afterlife: being changed when all the world could still seem bright and warm around him, sometimes…  When chocolates Ashley persuaded someone at the prison to get through to him could still taste familiar and flecked with sea salt, when some TV shows could still make him snicker despite himself.  That wasn’t how surrendering his life was supposed to work._

_Sal had explained the hollow, rattling feeling to Ash, just a week or so before he died.  Just a little, because she kept asking how he was and had known better than to believe any of his answers.  Well, any of his answers that didn’t involve the cult, the coming threat, all that.  Sal knew why Ashley didn’t believe that stuff.  We’re talking about anything just involving him, here._

_A couple days after Sal explained a little, Ashley had replied that no one had to be beyond hope, she didn’t think – Sal still had a life to live, even now.  At the very end of her letter, Ash reminded Sal that she loved him.  That bit had been written in a different kind of ink than all the rest, like she’d added it afterwards but couldn’t send the letter off without it.  It didn’t say whether she meant as a friend, or if she’d thought about dating him, nothing like that.  It didn’t really have to.  Sal wouldn’t have known how to reply either way.  He’d considered writing that she shouldn’t.  Love him, that is.  Or that he loved her too…  Or that he was sorry she’d ended up a part of his story.  By the time he died, Sal still hadn’t written back.  What’s another gnawing regret at the end of humanity?_

_There was a terrible rightness to the world around Sal, now, though he hated its grey emptiness more than he could say.  The same room where he’d died, from the ghostly side.  The same halls, same cells.  This was what Larry saw, now, now and for years – this was the world carved in dirty chalk.  Sunlight into grey water; the air into sour milk.  It matched the way Sal had felt inside, though.  See?  A terrible rightness.  Thinking about Larry – about anyone – feeling trapped here felt like falling into a deep pit._

_If Sal really worked at it, he could leave the execution room, leave the foot of the electric chair.  He could walk to his old cell and look at Ashley’s letter…  Or the corner of it he’d left by his bed, at least.  He felt so faded, the further he walked.  So faded, until he was dragged right back to the spot where he’d died, shaking with the pain of it._

_It wasn’t long before Sal realized he couldn’t leave the prison.  He had hoped Miss Rosenberg might have worked some new magic — he had hoped maybe the rules could be bent a little bit more, now.  But whatever ties he had to Addison Apartments, to his mission, to Larry, to anything, they couldn’t help him free, just yet._

_The void would come for everyone, so, so achingly soon, and Sal would be here.  As long as he lasted, straining against the bonds of his dying place.  Fighting, because that was all he could do.  Shouting the truth to those halls, because hadn’t that truth been all he’d had left?_

_There were other dead people throughout the prison, even in the room with that one fateful electric chair._ _They shuffled away from Sal without meeting his eyes – even they couldn’t believe him.  Even they probably thought he’d wanted to kill his family, his neighbors._

_That wasn’t the end, though._

_Could’ve been.  Wasn’t._

_Sal heard Ash’s voice as if from deep underwater.  He put a hand over where his still heart was, the memory of meat.  He thought maybe he was imagining her – some trick of death? – but it wouldn’t have mattered.  He was running towards Ash, by then, stumbling over his slip-on prison shoes.  Of course he was. He would be dragged back to his electric chair soon, but until then —_

_Until then —_

_Sal’d heard something crash, first.  The lamp on a prison guard’s desk, or something.  Ashley had hissed, “Ow, ow, ow,” very, very quietly.  But whispering didn’t mean a thing to the dead.  Sal realized for the first time how loud and far away, both, his and Larry’s metal CDs must’ve seemed to the ghosts back at Addison Apartments._

_Then, against all odds, there’d been something like Sal’s own voice going, “Oh.  Oops.  Well, we were close?  Been a while since I’ve climbed through a window.”_

_Ashley and someone with a voice unnervingly like Sal’s – down to the muffle from his prosthetic face! – were in the prison, now.  They’d picked some lock; they were taking huge, huge risks.  Sal figured he had to help in whatever way he could, whatever their plan was, now.  Maybe he could reach through the world and scare the crap out of some guards if Ash needed him to?_

_They had to be here for him , didn’t they?  Even after what Ashley knew Sal had done, even after that unanswered letter…  Even if Ashley still couldn’t believe in the end of the world.  In a way, that would have to be fine.  Sal hadn’t even really believed she would come this far._

_“Do you think he’ll answer us?  He – you? – might think we’re too late.”  Ash sounded so drained.  A soda can shaken empty and crumpled up in somebody’s hand._

_“If he’s reachable at all, he’ll come out for you,” said Sal’s own voice – but younger, maybe?  Not so tired? – “I would, anyway.  Always.”_

_Ash laughed, almost frantic, and Sal wanted to scream, “I’m here!  Hi!  Sorry I couldn’t be what we both needed from me!” pretty badly.  Instead, he strained through the scuffed metal prison guard’s door, messing with the lock on his way.  It would slide open for Ash easy, now.  He waited to make absolutely sure Ash had his old Super Gear Boy in her hands – she wasn’t gonna scream if he appeared out of the blue and get herself caught or something – and he waited to look whoever she was talking to in the face for a long, shivering, grey-water-universe of a second._

_Sal could’ve reacted all sorts of ways to what he saw there – guilty ways, furious ways, jealous ways, sure – but instead he just smiled a little at the hair ribbons peeking out from under the guy’s hood.  Ash’s art show, huh?  That felt like a lifetime ago.  It was hard to believe he’d ever held himself the way this Sal did…  Staring the world in the face, his hair pulled out of his eyes.  One of his special-occasion glass eyes was in, just now – it was the sort of day for the red vampire-y eye, apparently.  This was his own self, wasn’t it?  Did it matter how?_

_Probably._

_But if something here meant there was a new way – a new plan to keep everyone left in Nockfell from the unspeakable – Sal wasn’t about to question things yet.  No more than his usual level of constant, baffled universe-questioning, anyway._

_“And you can really bring him back to the apartments?  You’re sure?  Sal always used to say dead people get…  Stuck.”  Ashley was holding on to this other-Sal’s sleeve, like she was afraid he’d wander off and get lost.  Like she thought maybe he’d slip away at any second, or she didn’t trust him not to go throwing himself at something dangerous._

_This other-Sal paused.  Cleared his throat.  And then he offered up what was probably supposed to be a playfully mysterious voice: “Oh, ye of little faith.  I have my ways.”_

_Huh.  Well, that was new.  Sal – the real Sal – tucked a little hair behind his ear and reminded himself they had to do whatever it took.  Reminded himself it didn’t matter that he was wearing a singed prison jumpsuit, still sparking with the phantom burning of the electric chair…  Or that death hadn’t been kind enough to hand over a spectral version of his own prosthetic face, yet…  Or even that he hadn’t spoken to Ashley in person since before she thought of him as a murderer._

_That couldn’t be allowed to matter at a time like this.  Not if there was a way to get everything back on-track, right?  Maybe the universe had given Sal another chance to fix things.  A strange chance, maybe, but hey. Since when had anything around Nockfell ever not had its own kind of strangeness?_


	4. Some Things are Better Off Impossible

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello again~ I hope you enjoy this, if you read it!
> 
> OH NO, I forgot to mention: that bit with a shed there? That’s referencing another fic I wrote called “Camping!”, as one of many possibile things I’ve considered that could be going on with the shed in the woods... I thought it could be fun to try the idea out here. Sorry if it was confusing!

Sal Fisher — the lucky one, mind you, the one who’d never tasted prison food and had only ever ridden in the back of a cop car that once, when he and Larry got in trouble for sneaking around the X-Files-y people’s camp before they formed an alliance — spoke his own name into the prison hallway.  They had temporarily dampened the building’s security system with a handy little doohickey he’d gotten from those same paranormal investigator-types and kept stashed in his wallet just in case...  The hallway was creaky and stained, with yellowish slimy stuff caked between some of the tiles.

“Sal Fisher?” Sal whispered, and he listened to the green ghostly buzzing from the Super Gear Boy in Ash’s hands.  “Uh, Sally Face?”

Nothing, for a second.  Maybe a guard was patrolling a few halls down — they’d have to keep an eye out.  Maybe a janitor was scrubbing one of the bathrooms they’d passed, to account for the pop music drifting through the walls.

Sal saw himself manifest, then.  This other Sal Fisher came into being _not quite_ looking at them — he was staring at Ashley’s left boot, but his expression said he’d really rather be studying her face.  Trying to figure out what Ash was thinking of him, of what they had to do next.  Out of all people alive, this luckier Sal sort of had to be able to know that much.

“Sal?” Ashley gasped. “Sal — I was just a _couple minutes_ too late!  Could you hear me?  I was right at the door –”  Ash took a stumbling step forward, but Sal flinched — (without meaning to, the luckier Sal thought, and probably absolutely _hating_ that he’d done it) — and so she didn’t come any closer.

This other Sal — dead-Sal, with his dark veins and crackling burned-electric skin — shook his head.  Smiled.  He was bending just a little bit forward, so some of his hair fell stringy in his eyes.  Sal thought he probably knew just how this version of himself felt about those scars, those pieces taken out of his face.  No one _he’d_ ever met had really known how he felt about them, not completely, not until right that second.

“Thanks for trying, Ash,” dead-Sal said.  Softly.  Nervously, still looking at Ashley’s boot.  “Thanks for coming.  I didn’t think you were gonna...  Um.  You know there isn’t much time.”  He shifted, swatting a phantom spark off his sleeve. This Sal would probably be smelling his own cooked flesh forever, for as long as he stayed tied to the earth.

“I have a way to get you out of here,” the luckier Sal said.  Taking charge, for just a breath.  “Will you know what to do once you get to the apartments?  How to fix things?”

“Yes,” said dead-Sal, forever-burning-Sal.  “I mean, as much as I ever have.  Do I even want to know who — what? — you are?”

“I’ll tell you on the way,” Sal said.  “I’ve got some stuff to set up, for now.  Tech-stuff from Todd, spooky-stuff from...  Those other guys we know.  I’ll be right back.”

Sal glanced between his other self and this too-lost Ashley Campbell, her eyes still rimmed in stinging red.  There was so much here he didn’t understand.  Didn’t honestly _want_ to understand, even if it did feel like the universe clicking into place in his mind. “Ash’ll need to hide someplace, but...  I dunno, man.  You kids have fun?  I’ll walkie-talkie you when I’m done.  Like old times.”

Sal walked away quickly, before he could see whatever stricken, panicked expression his other self was making at Ashley’s boot by now.  He probably felt far too _readable_ without his prosthetic face.  People couldn’t normally get such a good look at every wince, every tic.  Everything.  But whatever this Sal had to work out with Ash, it was now-or-never, wasn’t it?  Sal knew he’d be really mad at whoever threw him in the deep end like this, so it might as well be his own self.

He had to find a hidden place to get everything ready; he knew damn well why Ashley had tried to vote down the plan where he went off on his own.  But maybe this sort of thing was what his nature could be for?  What these investigator people had been warning him about, yeah, but also why they’d trusted him.  Given him their cards, and all. Recklessness and empathy enough to drown him...  But also, if Sal got lucky again, enough to take care of someone.  Enough to give this other world’s Sal, Ash and Larry another chance to do what needed doing, at least.

Sal had only tried artificially induced possession once, when he and Todd finally figured out how to release the _thing_ clinging to the walls of that old shed in the middle of the woods, the one that didn’t have any kinda way in and had forgotten how to cast a shadow.  It still felt like parts of Sal’s mind were squelchy and strange, after that.  He still sometimes woke up feeling like he was actually somewhere else, and had way more contorted, scrambling limbs than he’d fallen asleep with.  Remembering how he’d been human, once, but long ago.  Sometimes death was freaking weird.

The X-Files-y organization said not to mess with possession, if anybody could help it, but Sal figured he’d been “possessing” his own meat with a soul as long as he’d been alive.  What’s one more Sally Face behind the prosthetic, inside the bones, just for a little while?

Sure, things could go really bad, but Sal knew his other self expected that.  Sal knew his other self wasn’t gonna back down now, just the same as he knew it could easily have been him, here.  Him trying to figure out how to look Ashley in the eyes again, wondering if he ever could…  His holding cell they’d shuffled past, no matter how impossible actually managing to go through with what this other Sal had done felt from outside.

Of course it wasn’t impossible. When the knife was staring you down, sharp with just the edge of your own reflection in its blade.  When something seeping had people you loved held tight by the deepest, realest parts of them, and you...  You _genuinely believed that._ It wasn’t impossible at all.  Of course Sal wanted to believe he couldn’t do it, wouldn’t have done it — of course Sal probably would’ve wanted to believe that even once his knife was warm and dripping red at his feet.

Maybe he wanted to help because he loved his friends, all versions of them, and he knew they needed _some_ sort of break right about now.  Maybe he felt like he owed this world so much in payment for the life he had waiting for him probably somewhere down the supermarket cereal aisle.  Ashley and Larry had agreed that if this lucky Sal, this Sal with so much of a future, could bring _their_ Sally Face home to Addison Apartments that would be all they truly needed from him.  That would be all they were willing to risk.  Sal’d tried to reason with them, but it wasn’t often Larry had tried arguing back at him.  It wasn’t often, and the exhaustion on this ghost-Larry’s face sort of broke his heart.

Sal plugged the sizzling, spectral cellphone Todd had been working on into an inky rock that looked like it was bleeding wires.  This wasn’t Todd’s best spell-rock, but it _was_ the one Sal had forgotten to take out of his backpack.  He tried not to think about how horrified his paranormal investigation acquaintances might be, knowing the books he and Todd had been reading...  Knowing the sigils Sal was scribbling on the floor of a tucked-away closet just then, using some prison guard’s set of dry erase markers.

Those markers made the air smell sickly chemical — well, them and the sticky mop bucket Sal was getting cozy with.

He would tell his other self about why this was dangerous, but he knew that guy’d probably just say it was dangerous even just walking down the street.  Dead-Sal’d probably say it was a living soul — a lucky soul — who had the most left to lose gambling on possession.  And he’d be right, too.

Soon enough, they’d be back at the Addison Apartments complex if all went well.  This other Sal would come unglued from his host, or...  Or they’d have to figure out _why_.  This other Sal would meet his Larry in the treehouse, and he’d have to take his place in some grand and gory horror play again.  He had so much to do, to become, to reveal, before anything was over.  That is, you know. If all went well.

Sal would know just a little about what his other self and Ash talked about, that short, short time they had both together and alone.  He’d know they were almost caught by a security guy coming to get his cranberry muffin out of the fridge; he’d know Ashley had laughed at a joke Sal was almost too shy to make.  She’d shown him pictures of his cat Gizmo on her phone, too, meaning she still met up with Todd’s boyfriend every now and then.  Neil had kept Gizmo safe when everything went wrong.

Sal — the lucky one — vowed to buy the version of Neil he knew some _really_ nice coffee beans if he ever got back to the supermarket.

They only talked a little about some letter Ash had sent Sal before his execution day came.  Whatever points they’d touched on left dead-Sal feeling blurry and warm, inside.  He had said what he needed to — even if it wasn’t everything he’d thought of saying — and climbed into the dark possession magic broom closet with Ashley at his side.  They’d talked a little about apologies, too, and expectations that had blown up in their faces.  Ashley had tried to hug him, and Sal had tried to hug her back, but — no dice.  No warm and tangible self.

He could try again through this living-Sal’s body, though.  Given what other cosmic rules they were probably breaking even just being here, _that_ should be no trouble at all.


	5. Epilogue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi~ Welcome to the epilogue!!! Thank you so much for sticking with this fic all the way to the end!!! >:D I hope you had fun with it. 
> 
> Please, have a wonderful day!

Ash hadn’t thought it would be weird, bringing by frozen pizza a little earlier in the week than she was really expected.  She’d heard her old friend Sally Face’s classes had been a little stressful lately; it’d been a clear night, the perfect weather for eating by the grill and watching stars come out.  Talking, or drawing on stuff while Sal did homework if he didn’t have time to play games just yet.  Most of Sal’s school books had been decorated pretty thoroughly, by now, thanks to nights just like this one.  Nights where it was hard to truly believe it was raining anywhere.

And it probably wouldn’t have been weird — everybody who lived in that house said Ashley could drop by whenever.  Said she could move in, too, if she needed a place to sleep.  But it _was_ weird, because Sal wasn’t back yet.  He’d gone to the grocery store hours ago, apparently, and had since dropped off the face of the earth.

“I thought maybe he was with you,” Larry told Ash, wide-eyed, letting the soda can he was drinking from drop to his lap.  Spilling a little Cherry Coke on his jeans.  “Do you think —?”

“Do I think something haunted got him?” Ash asked.  The cult. The squirming things always under the surface of their world.  She hadn’t believed in any of that at first, but, well...  Kinda hard not to, now.  “I dunno, but if something _did_ we better go help.”

Larry nodded.  Wiped the soda spill into his jeans.  Got his coat. They’d both texted and called Sal plenty of times so far — nothing.  Of course they’d looked around the grocery store...  They’d swung by restaurants and checked at the college; they’d dropped in on Sal and Larry’s parents and combed the woods for a while.  Not even a hair tie or a story about some soft-voiced, incorrigibly kind guy with blue hair to help track Sal down.

Todd and Neil hadn’t heard anything.  Neither had Chug and Maple.  If Ashley didn’t know any better, she might have thought the unsettled, impossible-to-place “This Isn’t Over” feeling Sal talked about sometimes was being proven right.

Ash was _this close_ to putting the fancy code into Sal and Todd’s secret research shed again, this time to get the number of somebody who might be able to divine whether Sal was okay...  Some sort of mystical mumbo-jumbo Ash was still trying to get used to...  When she and Larry agreed to check the supermarket one more time, now with Sal’s old Super Gear Boy in tow.  See if there was anything iffy going on.  Any ghosts around.

Ash hadn’t even gotten the Super Gear Boy switched on yet when Sal wandered down the cereal aisle, pushing along a cart with an almost comically squeaky wheel.  He looked exhausted, hunching over the cart with his head bowed and the hood of his jacket pulled as far over his face as it would go; she was _sure_ the aisle had been empty just a second before.  There were a lot of perfectly normal homey things in Sal’s cart, and there was so much mud on his shoes.  One of Todd’s spell-rocks was in the front basket of the cart, too, looking charred to a crisp.  Well-used, to say the least.  Todd was gonna have a lot of questions about that.

“Sally Face!  You scared the shit out of us!” Larry called, and Sal jumped like he hadn’t been expecting them.  Ash could tell his expression was guilty, worried, _thrilled_ to see them, all of it, even just reading the widening of his eyes from behind his prosthetic face.

“Sorry!” Sal said. “I honestly didn’t think it would take so long.”

“No need for ‘sorry,’” Ash said.  She sounded scolding, but she knew he wouldn’t mind.  “You’re okay?”

Sal nodded.  Took a shaky step out from behind the cart.  Larry threw a steadying arm around him, watching him sway on his feet, and Sal wrapped an arm around him right back.  He patted just a little between Larry’s shoulder-blades, almost like he was confirming to himself that he was solid.  Ashley fell to Sal’s other side and started pushing the cart to the register.  Of course Sal hadn’t shoved the squeaky one away — he was sweet, wasn’t he?

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” Ashley said, trying for a quip.  She used the sort of voice that actually meant a gigantic, super fake-enthusiastic wink.

“Something like that,” Sal snickered.  He reached for Ash’s arm and squeezed it, just a little, as they walked.  His eyes lingered on her like a question, but then they dropped away and he was going _“Oh shoot!”_ at the mud trail he hadn’t realized he was leaving through the store.

Time to finally buy these dang groceries, though.  Time to go home.


End file.
